Introducing Walkie Talkie and New Site Care Plans

We’ve built Walkie Talkie from the ground up with the user in mind. For a long time we’ve wanted to simplify the process of communicating with our team and submitting support requests, and this initial release handles that flawlessly, as well as gives us a really strong base to iterate and add new features in the future.

Walkie Talkie Support

Last month when we launched Happiness Reports, that was the first step toward showing the quality of work we provide every day. What we didn’t mention then, is that we’ve really shifted our focus to not only providing excellent customer service, but have started to invest heavily in software development to make communicating with our team as smooth as possible. Proactive communication is key in everything we do, and Walkie Talkie is the first step toward meeting our goal of always being available when you need us to be.

Walkie Talkie Features

At first glance Walkie Talkie may look like a simple web form in your WordPress dashboard, but it goes way beyond that. WAY BEYOND.

Say Goodbye to Email Woes

Support requests that are submitted through the Walkie Talkie dashboard completely bypass email, and instead use the Help Scout API to ensure 100% deliverability. If you submit a ticket to us from your WordPress dashboard, we’ll get it every single time. No more fussing with email filters, or overly aggressive firewalls; we’ll get your message every single time.

More Data for Faster Ticket Handling

When you submit a request via Walkie Talkie, it sends along with it all sorts of useful information to help our support technicians resolve issues more quickly. It tells us who submitted the message, which browser and version they’re using, as well as all sorts of useful details about the website itself including everything from active plugins to PHP and MySQL versions.

Notification Center

All of your update nags and notices in one place

Even though we handle all of your WordPress updates and ensure things stay up to date, there’s still a very real possibility that the plugins and themes on your site can give all sorts of warnings or nags that aren’t related to the software being current. I hope it’s not the case, but some of you may have seen WordPress dashboards like this one before.

We don’t want this ever again

With Walkie Talkie installed, all of those notifications will be neatly tucked away in the Notification Center for you to refer to as needed, and won’t clutter up the rest of your dashboard anymore. As always, if you have any questions about a notice in your WordPress dashboard, please get in touch.

Easy to Access Video Training

The videos produced by our good friends at WP 101, one of our favorite places to learn WordPress online, are an incredibly valuable resource, but we found that our customers weren’t accessing them nearly as frequently as they could be. So we’ve moved the video training into Walkie Talkie to keep the videos easier to access and browse as needed.

WP101 Video LibrarySingle Video

Under the hood

Thanks to the incredible work of Nathan Tyler and Rob Neu, Walkie Talkie takes full advantage of the WordPress REST API and all it has to offer. We’re officially running the latest beta in production on our servers, cause that’s how we roll ?.

Because of this, we’re already making big plans for future releases of Walkie Talkie. Here are some of the things we plan to include in the not-so-distant future.

Quick ticket history and search

Billing management integration with Chargify

Faster and smarter notifications from our team to you for major issues

Better handling and account management for customers with multiple websites tied to one customer account

All of this is going to happen within your own WordPress dashboard. It’s incredibly exciting, and something that gives me chills every time I think about it. We’re setup for the future to truly create a fantastic experience for our customers.

We’ll be rolling Walkie Talkie out to our customers over the next 24 hours, and we’ll send you a quick email to let you know it’s installed. Then you can start bombarding us with requests as soon as you’re ready ?

New Site Care Plans

I want to keep this part as brief as possible, but we’ve expanding our offering in a big way and it would be a mistake if I didn’t take the opportunity to tell you all about our exciting new site management plans. They go way beyond standard maintenance, and put us in a position to really take our service to the next level.

We’ve restructured all 3 of our plans because we want our support to truly become proactive, and not reactive as is the case with so many companies like ours. Each plan has a different feature set which we’ll talk about in detail on another day, but more important than that, each one has a different goal and intention as well, which wasn’t as clear on our last set of maintenance plans.

Just as a note: no pricing or level of service will change for our current customers 🙂 All active plans will be grandfathered.

Protect Plan

The Protect Plan is designed to do exactly that. Keep your site running, protected, and always up to date. We don’t distinguish between premium or free plugins and themes anymore. If you simply have a goal of making sure your site is maintained at the highest standard, the Protect Plan is for you.

Professional Plan

The Professional Plan is ideal for a small business just starting out, who are trying to really stake their claim in the online world. In the Professional Plan we’re able to be provide proactive support, get your site running fast and lean, and can help you establish your business online with things like SEO, eCommerce support, and monthly audits to help you track your progress as you grow.

Partner Plan

The Partner Plan is our newest offering and something clients have been requesting for quite some time. We have a number of clients who already fit this mold, and we’ve worked with them in this capacity for quite a while now, but today we’re formalizing our Partner Plan.

The companies who are part of our Partner Plan generally aren’t quite ready to hire a full time web development and design team, but they do have regular web projects and marketing initiatives. For Partners, we get deep into your business, and put together a monthly package that covers all of your bases, as well as gives you extra flexibility when you need it.

A Quick Note About Our Company Moving Forward

If you’ve made it this far into the post, thank you! All of these changes are definitely meant to set us apart from the competition, and I’m totally confident that they will.

Over the last year or so we’ve seen this WordPress support space grow tremendously, and as new companies have popped up, the trend is definitely toward lowering prices, and promising more. That’s simply not sustainable, so we’re pulling out all the stops as we move WP Site Care in a different direction.

Our new (higher) pricing reflects the quality of work we’re committed to providing long term, and not for the next six months as part of a quick cash grab. Finding talented people who are committed to customer services is definitely a unicorn hunt in some regards, and as far as I’m concerned, WP Site Care employs eight truly awesome unicorns.